Kubernetes is touted as a computing cure-all, fixing up multicloud networking to data mobility. The open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) may or may not be the panacea it’s hyped up to be. What is certain is that user-ready Kubernetes isn’t as easy as it sounds, so customers should shop carefully for a provider.

Enterprise users of Kubernetes and containers may not guess just how many moving parts are under the covers. There are a ton of tiny pieces that have to line up just so in order for them to work, according to Mark Shuttleworth (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Canonical Ltd. He likens these technologies to carefully constructed “fictions.”

Microservices is the architecture design favored in new software projects; however, getting the most from this type of approach requires overcoming several previous requirements. As the evolution from a monolithic to a distributed system takes place not only in the application space but also at the data store, managing your data becomes one of the hardest challenges. This article examines some of the considerations for implementing data as a service.

Majority of IT professionals now run container technologies, with 90 percent of those running in production and 7 in 10 running at least 40 percent of their application portfolio in containers — an impressive increase from two years ago, when just 67 percent of teams were running container technologies in production. According to the joint 2019 Annual Container Adoption Survey released by Portworx and Aqua Security, enterprises have started making bigger investments in containers.

In 2019, nearly one in five organizations is found to be spending over $1 million annually on containers (17%) as compared to just four percent in 2016.

SUSE has announced the latest version of its software-defined storage solution powered by Ceph technology. With SUSE Enterprise Storage 6, IT organizations can adapt to changing business demands. They may also reduce IT operational expense with new features focused on containerized and cloud workload support, improved integration with public cloud, and enhanced data protection capabilities, SUSE said.

We are excited to announce the addition of the Rook-Ceph storage Operator to OperatorHub.io. Operators are design patterns that augment and implement common day one and day two activities with Kubernetes clusters, simplifying application deployments and empowering developers to focus on creation versus remediation. The Rook-Ceph Operator is an upstream effort that Red Hat is leading and is using as part of its work towards Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.

Developing and deploying cloud-native applications at scale can be complex and challenging. The new Rook-Ceph storage Operator is designed to automate the packaging, deployment, management, upgrading, and scaling of Ceph clusters that provide persistent storage to stateful applications as well as infrastructure services (logging, metrics, registry) in Kubernetes clusters. The release of Rook’s Ceph Operator augments Kubernetes scheduling with a complement of stateful storage services including block, filesystem and object storage.

Red Hat Satellite 6.4.3 is generally available. The main drivers for the 6.4.3 release are a Request for Feature Enhancement (RFE) for capsule syncing control as well as general stability fixes.

The capsule syncing control feature enables the user to have control over when capsule syncs occur. Traditionally the capsule sync occurs automatically after a content view is updated, but some customers may want more granular control over when the synchronization occurs. Satellite 6.4.3 introduces a new setting in Administer —> Settings —> Content —> Sync Capsules after Content View promotion.

There is a saying in the legal profession that you should never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. Despite how this sounds, it is actually a rule most people follow in life. This is the source of that feeling you get when you’re too scared to raise your hand and ask a question. In Open Source we need to make sure that contributors feel like they already “know” the answers, so they will feel confident in making the request.

As a university lecturer, I always encouraged my students to first think about what they thought the answer was and then ask the question. In some cases, I encouraged them to actually write down what they thought the answer was. In this way, they could judge both their skills and their ability to grow based on what the answer turned out to be. It created an additional feedback loop.

This post is the second introduction to the Fedora Summer Coding interns Class of Summer 2019. In this interview, we’ll meet Alisha Mohanty and Shraddha Agrawal, who are both working on Fedora Happiness Packets to promote positive feedback loops in the Fedora community.

The 2019 OpenStack User Survey is now open and waiting for your input. Whether you’re a user of OpenStack, or an operator utilising it to power your offerings, the OpenStack Foundation (and the rest of the community) want to hear about your usage.

2018 saw the 11th OpenStack User Survey unveiled at the Berlin OpenStack Summit, giving some fantastic insight into how and where people are using OpenStack across 63 different countries. Usage in Asia surged dramatically in 2018, with 48% of respondents based in that continent, with Europe 2nd at 26% and North America 3rd with 20% of respondents.

Based on the Ceph Nautilus release and built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1, SUSE Enterprise Storage 6 enables IT organizations to seamlessly adapt to changing business demands while reducing IT operational expense with new features focused on containerized and cloud workload support, improved integration with public cloud, and enhanced data protection capabilities

Starting today, interns from the Fedora Summer Coding (F.S.C.) class of Summer 2019 start working on their projects. Three interns selected for Outreachy begin today, and another five interns selected for Google Summer of Code begin on Monday, May 27. The Fedora CommOps and Diversity and Inclusion teams worked together to interview all eight interns. This week on the Fedora Community Blog, we’ll introduce two interns each day of this week!

In addition to providing an operating system, the Fedora Project provides numerous services for users and developers. Services such as Ask Fedora, the Fedora Project Wiki and the Fedora Project Mailing Lists provide users with valuable resources for learning how to best take advantage of Fedora. For developers of Fedora, there are many other services such as dist-git, Pagure, Bodhi, COPR and Bugzilla that are involved with the packaging and release process.

These services are available for use with a free account from the Fedora Accounts System (FAS). This account is the passport to all things Fedora! This article covers how to get set up with an account and configure Fedora Workstation for browser single sign-on.

It runs “Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu Linux version 11.04) on Amazon EC2. Though the developers found out that lower versions of Ubuntu had varieties of random freezing incidents on Amazon EC2, they are certain the Linux 11.04 has been firm.

Digital leaders are embracing open banking as a cornerstone to their banking distribution strategy. They are using APIs to connect with partners and bring innovative digital services to their customers who continue to seek better experiences.

More broadly, customers want banking services that integrate into their digital life, explains Capgemini in its World Retail Banking Report 2018. "That’s why it makes strategic sense for banks to support the API-led economy and collaborate with third-parties to offer new-age services," the report says.

Running software is something that most of us do without thinking about it. We run in "on premises"—our own machines—or we run it in the cloud - on somebody else's machines. We don't always think about what those differences mean, or about what assumptions we're making about the securtiy of the data that's being processed, or even of the software that's doing that processing. Specifically, when you run software (a "workload") on a system (a "host") on the cloud or on your own premises, there are lots and lots of layers. You often don't see those layers, but they're there.

For the past few years Prometheus has solved the monitoring needs of many and it is exceptional at what it does. Being the second project to graduate from CNCF incubation, Prometheus has exploded in popularity and is the monitoring tool of choice for many cloud native adopters. While Prometheus is great at real time monitoring, it was not designed to be a long term persistent store of metrics.

SUSE and Veeam are teaming up to offer a great solution for your data protection needs. Veeam has just granted their Veeam Ready-Repository (and soon, Veeam Ready-Object) designation to SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5. Now enterprises get a high-performing and flexible backup target with high scalability. Together, SUSE and Veeam can deliver an extremely cost-effective, flexible, scalable solution for enterprise archive, backup and recovery implementations.

In a short while, SUSE will become the largest independently operating open source company in the world. Some have branded this era, “The New SUSE and wow it’s time to see what “The New SUSE” looks like at KubeCon Barcelona. We are here to talk about modern, Kubernetes-based application delivery solutions that you need today. We’ve upped our sponsorship and we’re ready to rock.

Kubernetes (or K8s, if you want to be cool) is currently one of the fastest growing technologies in the world of open source. These days the technology in, and associated with, Kubernetes seems almost endless – and the innovation comes just as fast. Kubernetes was first introduced in 2014 as a brainchild of the citizens and people of Google-landia. 2017 saw Kubernetes start to take off in popularity largely due to an incredibly loyal following of contributors, and by 2018, Kubernetes was looking like a de-facto standard for container orchestration. As of recent, Kubernetes has seen advances in flexibility, governance, storage, and security. As with all things open source, you can just download it from the internet, too – what a time to be alive!!!

The latest Tumbleweed snapshot, 20190514, hailed in twenty recorded bug fixes for KDE Applications 19.04.1, which include improvements to Kontact, Ark, Cantor, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Spectacle and Umbrello. Among the highlighted fixes were a crash in KMail’s text sharing plugin that was fixed and regressions in the video editor Kdenlive were corrected. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (alsa) 1.1.9 dropped several patches and fixed a rate plugin for comparisons as well as added support for GCC’s LinkTimeOptimization. The VLC audio visual decoder package dav1d 0.3.1 provided arm optimization for Multiple Sequence Alignment Compressor (MSAC). The package that has the implementation of HTTP/2 and its header compression algorithm HPACK in C, nghttp2, fixed a compilation against modern LibreSSL in the 1.38.0 version update. Tcsh 6.21.00 ported patches and the 4.2.15 version of yast2-storage-ng worked on the partitioner to prevent edition of block devices that are part of a multi-device Btrfs. The snapshot is currently trending at a 96 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

In the first part of this series, we looked at the role of containers as a fundamental enabler of fine-grained, microservices architectures that enable rapid, incremental, trial-and-error innovation. In the second part, we described in some detail the continuing importance of "middleware"—whether it's called middleware or something else—for development of enterprise applications in containerized, cloud-native environments. We arrived at the notion that not only must traditional middleware be substantially reimagined and refactored to optimally support cloud-native applications, it can also be substantially more powerful when it is "engineered together" in a way that creates a unified, coherent application environment. Let's unpack this a bit and understand the opportunities, benefits, and requirements.

We talk a lot about hybrid cloud because we believe it’s important to the IT strategy of most enterprises. (We dedicate an entire track to it at Red Hat Summit, happening this week.) But equally significant is the foundation of your hybrid cloud―the operating system (OS).

Clouds are made up of the same interoperable technologies: OSs, virtualization software, management and automation tools, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The quality of those connections depends on the consistency, reliability, and flexibility of your OS.

Ever since IBM announced that it’s going to acquire the open source giant Red Hat, Linux and open source enthusiasts have been voicing their concerns regarding the future of Red Hat? Is it going to become just another IBM subsidiary or is Red Hat going to adopt IBM’s corporate culture?

At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, executives of both companies shared their thoughts and reiterated their commitments to move forward and drive more innovation. When asked if the Linux giant would remain independent, IBM CEO, chairman, and president Ginni Rometty said: “I don’t have a death wish for $34 billion.”

Two days are on the books, just one day left of Red Hat Summit 2019. We’re a bit sad, too, but don’t despair - there’s plenty left to do, see, and learn on Thursday. To cap it all off, we’re looking forward to Thursday night’s Red Hat Summit Party featuring Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Let’s see what else is going on Thursday.

longside this week’s product announcements at Red Hat Summit 2019, Red Hat delivers yet another major milestone in building an open hybrid cloud ecosystem with new certification offerings, a new approach to RHEL-based container images, better tools for Red Hat and partners to support customers as well as addressing the need for application portability.

Red Hat’s vision of an open hybrid cloud is: any application, in any environment, on any cloud, portable and operated consistently - from public and private clouds to bare metal and virtual environments in traditional datacenters, the extended datacenter (edge) and end-user devices.

Organizations today are investing in new technologies and practices to transform the way they deliver value to their customers. This has become a critical investment area as we move into an era of disruption, and cloud computing plays a vital role in supporting both the technologies and processes driving the digital transformation imperative. Offering greater speed, cloud-based strategies leave more time for companies to focus on building and delivering innovation, value, and differentiation while creating financial efficiency.

While moving to a single public cloud has many benefits, the reality is that for some workloads the public cloud simply doesn’t make sense, or meet requirements for things like control, security or regulatory compliance. As a result, a majority of today’s IT environments are inherently hybrid, comprising of applications deployed on-premises, and in both private and public clouds. Some highly optimized or secure workloads can continue to be deployed in bare metal and virtualized environments. As organizations embrace the public cloud, they may select multiple public clouds in order to take advantage of unique cloud capabilities as well as for optimizing vendors. According to IDC, 70 percent of customers already deploy multicloud environments and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private1. Therefore, many organizations are looking to embrace hybrid cloud strategies as the best way to achieve digital transformation.

As I prepare for my talk at Red Hat Summit 2019, I can’t help but think about what led to today.

Since the moment you arrived at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for Red Hat Summit (or watched the livestream if you couldn’t join us in person) you’ve experienced the efforts of Red Hat’s Marketing Communications team. This is the big game for us, and we work all year long to deliver an immersive, creative experience to showcase what Red Hat and the open source community are up to.

But we don’t do it in a vacuum. It takes a multitude of internal teams, stakeholders, and external collaborators to bring this to life. It takes the Red Hat Open Studio.

The lines are blurred today. Virtualization and container platforms have started to converge. DevOps has taken on a central role as mediator between developers and system admins. Kubernetes has emerged as a platform for both infrastructure and applications. CIOs think in terms of on-prem and cloud deployments. Clearly, the operative word has changed from ‘or’ to ‘and’. This imperative is one of the drivers fueling the rise of hybrid cloud technologies.

Recently, Joe Brockmeier wrote a great blog post on the value of enterprise open source technologies. I’d like to extend that discussion to the value of open source in the era of the hybrid cloud.

At Red Hat Summit, OpenShift version 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 are announced, as new foundations on which enterprise applications can be developed and delivered.

When looking at the modern IT landscape, few if any technologies are as pervasive for enterprise application and cloud deployment as Linux. Leading the charge for enterprise Linux has long been Red Hat, which held its annual Red Hat Summit May 7- 9, announcing new Linux and Kubernetes container platform releases.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL) is the first major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux platform since July 2014. The RHEL 8 release benefits from a new web console project that makes it easier for users to manage a system.

Traditionally, a hybrid cloud runs simultaneously on a public and private cloud. Historically, that's been done with three models: Hybrid-cloud management software such as HPE Helion; vendor-native hybrid cloud platforms, such as Microsoft with Azure and Azure Stack; and Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, including Cloud Foundry, which can bridge over Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Or, you can do what Red Hat announced at Red Hat Summit: Use Kubernetes container orchestration with Red Hat OpenShift 4.

As a technology partner with SAS, it is inspiring to see that real life challenges are being addressed with SAS Viya and other SAS products. SUSE plays an important role by providing open infrastructure which is reliable, secure, high performing, available on all major architectures and public clouds, with SUSE’s world class global support. We work closely with SAS to ensure an excellent platform for their applications, and a great experience for our joint customers. Masood Noori, solution architect at SUSE, worked closely with SAS R&D and SUSE’s performance experts to create a tuning guide for running SAS with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). This SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Tuning and Configuration for SAS guide was the basis of Masood’s session topic at the event. Along with covering the tuning recommendations and methodology, Masood also provided background about SUSE, including news of becoming independent (see blog from CEO Nils Brauckmann), and our partnership with SAS.

SUSE Expert Days are free, one-day training sessions, full of technical conversations and demos that will provide you with the tools you need to keep pace with your evolving business. Sessions are delivered by SUSE engineers, experts, and IT professionals that realize that in today’s business environments, every company is a digital company. The content is curated knowing that you not only have to keep up, you need to be ready to transform in an agile and strategic way.

This month has produced a total of three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot thus far and GNOME 3.32.1 was made available to Tumbleweed users in snapshot 20190505. The key packages that arrive so far this month are a newer Linux Kernel, a minor update for python-setuptools and the text editor GNU Nano fixed the spell checker from crashing.

The latest Tumbleweed snapshot, 20190507, which delivered nano 4.2, had a large update of changes for ghostscript 9.27; the versatile processor for PostScript data extensively cleaned up the Postscript name space and will now focus on the next releases to make SAFER the default mode of operation. The Optimized inner loop Runtime Compiler, orc 0.4.29, added decorator command line argument to add function decorators in header files. The latest python-setuptools 41.0.1 version fixed issues with the PEP 517, which specifies a standard API for systems which build Python packages. Text editor vim 8.1.1282 was also released in the snapshot. The snapshot is currently trending at a 95 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Mozilla Firefox 66.0.4 fixed extension certificate chain in snapshot 20190506. There was an improvement to network status detection with Network Manager with the glib2 2.60.2 update. The asn1c-based parser was replaced by an openssl-based PKCS parser with the kmod 26 package. The openblas_pthreads 0.3.6 had some changes for POWER6, PowerPC 970 and ARMv7 and ARMv8. The 1.28 perl-YAML package offered a security fix and xfsprogs updated to the 5.0.0 version from 4.20.0. The snapshot is currently trending stable at a 92 rating on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

KDE applications got a big update to 18.12. Dolphin (file manager) received many improvements, including the ability to hide the Places panel and dock the Terminal panel. The folder view and settings dialog have been updated. Ocular (PDF and document viewer) has a new typewriter annotation feature that enables you to type everywhere on a page. Konsole (terminal application) now has full support for emoji. The Gwenview (image viewer) has seen many improvements, including the crop tool, the reduce red eye tool, improved zooming and better drag and drop functionality. Spectacle (screenshot tool) gained the ability to sequentially number screenshot files and now remembers the lastest save settings. With the rectangular region selection mode, you can select a part of the screen . Ark (unzip tool) now supports the tar.zst archive file standard.

Krita is updated to 4.1.8 and introduces the new reference images tool that lets you place and edit a reference image to help you with drawing. Another help with drawing is provided by the improved vanishing point assistant. Krita 4.1 features many animation improvements and a better color picker tool.

LibreOffice 6.1 offers 2 new icon themes ‘Colibre’ and ‘Karasa Jaga’, it loads documents with many images faster, the gradient tool has been improved and new fill gradients are available, you can now add page numbers and page counts in the header and footer sections of Writer, you can insert a Signature line in Writer, you can now sort images anchored to cells in Calc, the merge cells dialog box has become much clearer in Calc, you can now use CSVs as data sources in Calc and a new page menu has been added in Impress.

The release of openSUSE Leap 15.1 is about three weeks away. To help spread the word about the release, we have counters available at counter.opensuse.org and more artwork on https://github.com/openSUSE/artwork/. You can put these items on your social media or blog pages to make sure everybody knows that the Release is Coming!

In this interview, Matthew Johns – Global Product and Solutions Marketing Manager at SUSE talks about OpenStack Airship and why SUSE is embracing the project. We also talked about the evolution of the OpenStack Project itself.

Airship, a collection of loosely coupled but interoperable open source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning, is available in its first release today. Airship 1.0 delivers a wide range of enhancements to security, resiliency, continuous integration and documentation, as well as upgrades to the platform, deployment and tooling features.

The SUSE community pondered new challenges and the path ahead at its annual SUSECON convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

The past 12 months have been a whirlwind of change for SUSE. Former parent company Micro Focus announced last July that it was spinning off SUSE as an independent company [1], and since then, the leading European enterprise Linux vendor has been in a flurry of reinvention. In addition to embracing a new emphasis on growth, SUSE is also finding its way through the changes in the Linux space following IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.

Like most Linux users, I rarely touch the actual code for the Linux kernel. Sure, I've looked at it. I've even compiled the kernel myself on a handful of occasions—sometimes to try out something new or simply to say I could do it ("Linux From Scratch" is a bit of a right of passage).

But, unless you're one of the Linux kernel developers, odds are you just don't get many opportunities to truly look "under the hood".

Likewise, I think for many Linux users (even the pro users, sysadmins and developers), the wild world of kernel development is a bit of a mystery. Sure, we have the publicly available Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML.org) that anyone is free to peruse for the latest features, discussions and (sometimes) shenanigans, but that gives only a glimpse at one aspect of being a kernel developer.

And, let's be honest, most of us simply don't have time to sift through the countless pull requests (and resulting discussions of said pull requests) that flood the LKML on a daily basis.

With that in mind, I reached out to three kernel developers—each working at some of the most prominent Linux contributing companies today—to ask them some basic questions that might provide a better idea of what being a Linux kernel developer is truly like: what their days look like and how they work with kernel developers at other companies.

With the help of Natural Language Processing, an organisation can gain valuable insights, patterns, and solutions. Python is one of the widely used languages and it is implemented in almost all fields and domains. In this article, we list down 10 important Python Natural Language Processing Language libraries.

On June 27th, Red Hat will not only be hosting one of the best technical gatherings of 2019, but it will be doing so in Washington D.C. — not San Francisco, Seattle, or ... DevNation Federal conference will bring together industry experts and key maintainers of popular open source projects in a one-day immersive conference for federal developers.

The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200.
If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated.
The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query.
[...]
The team working on the code is small, therefore please be a bit patient if you wait for reactions. I hope we have improved our reaction time in the last months but we still are lacking in that respect.

In the last month, we’ve polished the user interface and added the last planned features to Blender 2.80. The details can be found in the weekly development notes.
Now we are freezing the user interface, so that there is a stable base for creating documentation and tutorials. Settings will stay in the same place and screenshots should remain valid for the final 2.80 release. A handful of menu entries may be added, or a tooltip might be improved, but nothing major that would break documentation.

In order to meet the July release target for Blender 2.80, there is now an API and user-interface freeze on this next feature update for this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software.
Blender 2.80 has now entered its UI and API freeze milestone for the 2.80 release. The Blender settings should also be maintained now moving forward for the Blender 2.80 release and its Python API compatibility, including for add-ons.

FreeBSD 11.3 Beta 1

24 May: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest stable series since the end of last year, for those still on FreeBSD 11 there is the 11.3 update due out for release in July while this weekend the first beta was issued.
FreeBSD 11.3 offers up the latest security updates and other stable bug fixes over FreeBSD 11.2 that was released nearly one year ago. But for those craving all the latest features and functionality, FreeBSD 12 is in release form or there is also FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.

Best Command-Line FTP Clients for Linux

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used for transferring files between a client and a server on a computer network. The very first FTP applications were made for the command line before GUI Operating Systems even became a thing and while there are several GUI FTP clients, developers still make CLI-based FTP clients for users who prefer using the old method.
Here’s a list of the best command-line based FTP clients for Linux.